The Proposal
Directed by Anne Fletcher
Runtime: 107 min.
The Hangover
Directed by Todd Phillips
Runtime: 100 min.
The U.S. premiere of
Alain Cavalier’s 1962 Le Combat dans L’ile at Film Forum (screening
through June 18) resurrects the captivating images of Romy Schneider
and Jean-Louis Trintignant, both young, vibrant and emotionally complex
in ways actors rarely are anymore.Their classic glamour came back to
mind while I watched The Proposal and The Hangover—contemporary movies
that use actors in ways that disrespect the audience’s need for big-
screen identification.
Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds as
The Proposal’s battling white-collar workers who fall in love contrast
Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and Justin Bartha as the
bachelor party gang in The Hangover.
Good looks and genuine
charm are the basis of Bullock and Reynolds’ appeal; their skillful
comic nuance creates an implicit trust.
But in The Hangover,
something different occurs: rising-star Bradley Cooper and gang
represent the dirtbag element that has become acceptable in
contemporary comedy.
Cooper isn’t immediately likable; he’s
got shifty-eyed good looks that passed for WASP arrogance in his
breakthrough supporting role in Wedding Crashers. It recalls what Jack
Nicholson brought to the mainstream. But where Nicholson’s early star
roles were meant to be countercultural, Cooper now embodies today’s
impish standard.
Yet both The Proposal and The Hangover are
coarse farces that stretch their performers’ capacities for human
rapport past credibility into base, desperate plot mechanisms. Every
scene between Bullock and Reynolds only suggests how fine they might be
in good circumstances, while Cooper’s posse increasingly misbehaves as
if confirming a general hopelessness about society and adulthood.
Bullock’s Margaret, a New York book editor, bribes her male secretary,
Andrew (Reynolds), into marriage to protect her illegal alien status.
Cooper’s crew uses a friend’s Las Vegas bachelor party to avail
themselves of unlimited masculine prerogative—meaning drugs, drinking,
sex, violence, bestiality and blackmail. Marriage is the implicit
casualty of both movies—a plot development that looks especially odd
next to the Cavalier film where Schneider,Trintignant and Henri Serre
(from Jules and Jim) ponder the ethics of marriage and politics.
Anne Fletcher, director of The Proposal, and Todd Phillips, director of The Hangover, do the opposite.They merely shoot their scripts without much feeling for interpersonal commitment among couples or friends. No doubt this derives from the insistent immaturity established by Judd Apatow’s juvenile comedy. Remember how The New Yorker tried connecting Knocked Up to the sophistication of 1930s screwball? It proved that this new movement merely flattered the privileged egotism of our culture’s ruling class. Screwballs often satirized class standards in pursuit of some greater, personal virtue.That’s what made such knockabout directors diverse as Leo McCarey, George Cukor, Gregory La- Cava and Preston Sturges so elegant. Even Cavalier’s little-known French New Wave experimental chic used a romantic triangle format to explore political morality.
But Fletcher and Phillips do the opposite. In each film, the most shocking thing is not the disrespect for heterosexual marriage or the shameless indulgence of frat-boy toilet humor, but the filmmakers’ distance from the realities of family, home, work, love and place. The actors occupy a nowhereland of outrageous gags (Proposal casually mocks the working class and Hangover offers blithe misogyny.) Their farce structures don’t exercise or confirm real experience but follow the manipulations of TV comedy—only a laff track is missing from each. It’s an ordeal watching grown men stumbling through Vegas amidst a tiger, a baby, a stripper and assorted thugs—including a cameo by Mike Tyson that makes the humanistic inquiry of James Toback’s recent documentary seem for naught. It’s also dismal watching the key scene where Bullock and Reynolds ad lib the story of their proposal to a public gathering; as each improvisation is cut up into TV jigsaw puzzle pieces instead of a unified two-shot. It falls flat.
The Proposal and The Hangover are slippery-slope comedies celebrating irresponsible, unethical behavior for public enjoyment. Moviemaking this bad is only sustainable if all you care about is Hollywood capitalism. I know some people get more thrill out of the box-office totals than they do from a good comedy (and sometimes conflate box-office success with artistic mirth), but this reduction of romantic ethics has no justification other than money-making. Look at how Fletcher bungles Bullock and Reynolds’ bonding moment: They sing Rob Base and DJ Easy Rock’s “It Takes Two” in geometrical (emotional) opposition. And Bullock’s comic solo doing Lil Jon’s “Get Low” is clumsily staged. Although Fletcher’s career began as a choreographer, Bullock and Reynolds don’t dance at the end; they’re denied potential romantic epiphany like Schneider and Trintignant. Instead, Fletcher’s finale is a blooper reel imitating When Harry Met Sally and Mr. & Mrs. Smith—confirming she’s a hack like Todd Phillips.
anonymous
